Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Tri-X 4GB Graphics Card Review

Sapphire Triple Fan Hawaii

It was mid-December when the very first custom cooled AMD Radeon R9 290X card hit our offices in the form of the ASUS R9 290X DirectCU II. It was cooler, quieter, and faster than the reference model; this is a combination that is hard to pass up (if you could buy it yet). More and more of these custom models, both in the R9 290 and R9 290X flavor, are filtering their way into PC Perspective. Next on the chopping block is the Sapphire Tri-X model of the R9 290X.

Sapphire's triple fan cooler already made quite an impression on me when we tested a version of it on the R9 280X retail round up from October. It kept the GPU cool but it was also the loudest of the retail cards tested at the time. For the R9 290X model, Sapphire has made some tweaks to the fan speeds and the design of the cooler which makes it a better overall solution as you will soon see.

The key tenets for any AMD R9 290/290X custom cooled card is to beat AMD's reference cooler in performance, noise, and variable clock rates. Does Sapphire meet these goals?

The Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X 4GB

While the ASUS DirectCU II card was taller and more menacing than the reference design, the Sapphire Tri-X cooler is longer and appears to be more sleek than the competition thus far. The bright yellow and black color scheme is both attractive and unique though it does lack the LED light that the 280X showcased.

Sapphire has overclocked this model slightly, to 1040 MHz on the GPU clock, which puts it in good company.

AMD Radeon R9 290X

ASUS R9 290X DirectCU II

Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X

GPU Cores

2816

2816

2816

Rated Clock

1000 MHz

1050 MHz

1040 MHz

Texture Units

176

176

176

ROP Units

64

64

64

Memory

4GB

4GB

4GB

Memory Clock

5000 MHz

5400 MHz

5200 MHz

Memory Interface

512-bit

512-bit

512-bit

TDP

~300 watts

~300 watts

~300 watts

Peak Compute

5.6 TFLOPS

5.6+ TFLOPS

5.6T TFLOPS

MSRP Price

$549

$569

$599

There are three fans on the Tri-X design, as the name would imply, but each are the same size unlike the smaller central fan design of the R9 280X.

Looking at the back of the card, you can clearly see both the heatsink and the fan shroud extend past the standard PCB. That is an interesting note to make as well: as far as I can tell the Sapphire Tri-X card is using the exact same PCB design as the reference AMD R9 290X cards we have in-house. Rather than have some engineers work on a custom design, Sapphire seems to be content with swapping the cooler and changing some firmware.

The Tri-X is a very heavy graphics card thanks to the large heatsink that Sapphire has integrated in the design. Here you can see the fins and heatpipes that whisk the heat away from the GPU to be cooled by the air movement of the three included fans.

External display connectivity also remains unchanged with support for a pair of dual-link DVI connections, a full-size HDMI port and a full-size DisplayPort.

The Sapphire Tri-X 290X still only requires a 6-pin and an 8-pin power connection. This angle might make it look like the connections are hard to remove after having been installed, but there is more than enough room for your fingers.

The fans Sapphire has included on the Tri-X are surprisingly efficient and quiet (as you will see in our testing on the following pages). The Sapphire model was more than capable of keeping up with the ASUS DirectCU II in our testing.

This side by side comparison shows the difference in the size between the Sapphire and the ASUS custom R9 290X models. No girth jokes, okay?

Incredible review, points out reference PCB right away! This card look absolutely amazing, fixes all wrongs with the reference design. Impressive acoustics and thermals looks to be better than the DCUII. A definite buy, glad I didn't pull the trigger on the 780TI.

i got Sapphire 7970 OC Dual-x and i RMA it 5 times!
(yup five times, and then i just gave up..)
they head massive rattling noise, I wonder if you test this issues and how was your impression from
general design build quality?

no review online warned back at the time
about this GPU it's poor design/build quality
and misinformed dimensions. (sapphire did not fix the wrong data till today...

If you're asking about the OCed 290X, the 3 things that cause it to throttle being power consumption, thermals and fanspeed - I'm going to go with power consumption.
Ryan, whats your CPU clocks in these reviews and do you have any boost clock data for the geforces here?

untrue, it's like you didn't read the article.
the real result is this; clock for clock these cards are evenly matched. seems people NEED the 780Ti to win. I WANT the 290X to win. but, I don't NEED it too.

again I make this statement. neither this card nor the ASUS card are the fastest 290Xs that will hit the market.

I pulled the trigger on a 780 Ti about a month ago, the price of the card is 1000 $ where I live. The 290x Tri-X is at 545 $, you have no idea how much I regret this. If only AMD could have landed these solutions earlier..

i have no idea why you would buy one card with a ~36% mark up ($730 as opposed to $1000) and then compared it to a estimated actual retail price. who knows a Tri-X, which is hopefully $599 not $549, can run over $800 at that time.

complain about who charged you that much mark up and that you paid it.

The core clocks are misleading, you listed the 1040mhz boost clock of the 290X in all graphs but also listed the base clock for the 780 TI and 780.

Which makes it seem as if the 290X needs to run at 164mhz higher to match the 780 Ti but that is entirely inaccurate.
Since both the 780 Ti and the 780 constantly operate at significantly higher clocks than the base clock as has been showcased by other review sites.

Can you please, add vrm temps into future reviews, and maybe even update this one with gpu-z vrm temps? we almost have no reviewer who does this, and its very important, core temp is useless without vrm temps measurements, especially with oc.

It's actually really strange....after the crash it would not restart...just would hang at the windows loading screen....I was able to get back in by putting my old card back in and uninstalling the AMD driver then replacing my new card and reinstalling the driver....but it again crashed....more irreparably this time.

I can boot to desktop with the card without the amd driver but every time I reinstall the driver and restart it hangs in the windows load screen. It will boot to desktop in safe mode ie without loading the AMD driver.

I've used driver sweeper in safe mode to ensure complete removal and reinstalled the driver but is no go now.

I've even tried a fresh windows install but with the same outcome....pretty sure its hardware failure.

point conceded. it, in fact, does not indicate that you would be lying. I encourage you to sign up though... lots of anon bs here at times.
as for that card, you might be in possession of an 11℅er, which sucks. 13.12 drivers are supposed to be the fix. I got nothing else. good luck.

Thanks snook,...it was the 13.12 driver I installed....I've got an RMA number now...I've also contacted Gigabyte global technical services but they haven't come back with any answer yet.....I'm also out, all I can think is either hardware failure or corrupted bios or both....just seems strange it will boot to desktop with out the amd driver ?

Those aren't stock numbers and every card has it's own limit on how far it can overclock. Might be stable for you, but not for everyone.

It would be nice to see a link to an 780 ti classified forum thread, where everyone is posting their stable clocks/temps. I doubt the majority who are pushing the cards to find their limits will always run them at those limits.

After enduring months of using Intel's HD Graphics 4600 with my I5 4670K, I'm glad to see Amazon offering the Sapphire R9 290 (non-X) TRI-X OC for $499 US. It's $100 over AMD's reference price but at least it's better than most of the recent high price gouging & not all that unreasonable for the extra performance, cooling & noise reduction the TRI-X provides. I personally prefer the 290 over the 290X but I'm not a hardcore gamer looking for every FPS.

As of 1/4/14, it can be ordered on Amazon even though it's currently out of stock; it will be shipped directly from Sapphire Technology when available. Hopefully there won't be much delay. Newegg currently lists it as out of stock as well but without a price or being able to preorder.

Why are tech journalists seemingly afraid to round up the extra penny in MSRP pricing? Are you trying to sell something? It's not for the sake of accuracy, because you'll round down $599.99 to "$599", which comes off as rather math-disabled. We know why companies do it, but why do tech journalists embrace this? Sure it's minor, but it's primitive and condescending, and when an ostensibly independent writer does it, it's plain bizarre. You may as well preface the price with "only" and add an exclamation point.
Round up the penny, as if you were talking to a human being.

Just finally after waiting for ever for stocks to come in I purchased 2 Sapphire Tri-X X9 290's for a little over a thousand bucks...
By far the most bang for a thousand bucks on the market today if not ever!!
Can't wait to pick them up tomorrow!! YAYA!!

This card is not fully customized like the ASUS one. It's an overclocked card with three fans. Only Vram2 is cooled better than the Asus one a part from that the Asus card is much better. Do not spend cash on a poor brand like Saphire, they can't compete with Asus.